Research On Complex Declarative Knowledge Learning

How do people learn some complex declarative knowledge, such as the structure of the solar system, the human circulatory system and so on? When people leam the complex declarative knowledge, how will their cognitive processes change? Complex declarative knowledge learning takes longer time and requires cognitive processes that are more complicated than the associative learning processes needed to memorize pairs of words. But researchers know little about this domain.The dissertation focuses on complex declarative knowledge learning and mainly specifies the following topics. What is complex declarative knowledge? What characteristics does it have? How does it change during the course of learning? What is the process of complex declarative knowledge learning? Which factors will affect the process of learning? How can teachers improve their instruction on the declarative knowledge? The dissertation explores these questions respectively in perspective of theory and experiment. The dissertation is composed of six chapters.Chapter one deals with the background, the significance and the assumption of this dissertation. The study of complex declarative knowledge is still in its infancy so that few researchers discuss the process of complex declarative knowledge learning. But in fact, the knowledge involved during the practice of instruction and learning is organizational and systematic. That is the complex declarative knowledge. Thereby the research on complex declarative knowledge learning in this dissertation is valuable in theory and practice.Chapter two discusses basic characteristics and types of changes of complex declarative knowledge. Starting with setting forth the theories of conceptual change, it elucidates that declarative knowledge supports conceptual change. Afterwards, it discusses the characteristics of complex declarative knowledge in terms of knowledge bases and organization, and makes an conclusion that declarative knowledge bases are very large and they exhibit complex organization. And besides, it illustrates the changes of complex declarative learning that include larger size, denser connectedness, finer grain, increased consistency, greater complexity, higher level of abstraction, and shifted vantage point.Chapter three constructs the model of the process of complex declarative knowledge learning.It adopts mental model to represent learners'prior knowledge in perspective of correctness, completeness, and coherence, and conceives of the process of complex declarative knowledge learning as a model composed of two stages, namely comprehension monitoring and constructive activities. According to the model, it puts forward four basic experimental hypotheses.Chapter four expatiates on the method that is adopted in experimental research. It systematically demonstrates the method of verbal analysis in experimental research, and points out eight technical steps and other technical details for analyzing verbal data. Whereafter, it specifies the learning material, the design of questions in the posttest, the subjects, and the experimental procedure.Chapter five makes an analysis of verbal data in terms of qualitative and quantitative methods to validate several experimental hypotheses. As to the quantitative analysis, it builds up a coding categorical schema, in which it defines and illustrates the meaning of each category, and uses this schema to analyze verbal data. As to the qualitative analysis, it mainly analyzes the course of learning of a subject as a supplement to the quantitative analysis. It validates the following hypotheses: The process of complex declarative knowledge learning is the interaction among mental model, learning activities and text. The learners' achievement is affected by deep constructive activities in the learning process: the more learners do deep constructive activities, the better they achieve learning achievement, but the shallow constructive activities don't affect the learners' achievement. With more self-monitoring activities, the learners will produce more deep constructive activ...